Two things happened to home media servers this summer, and neither one changes what’s running on our NAS — but they’re both worth talking about, since we actually run Plex and the Arr stack ourselves and have some skin in this game.
Plex tripled its price
As of July 1, a new Lifetime Plex Pass costs $749.99 — up from $249.99, itself already a hike from $119.99 about a year before that. If you bought in before July 1, your existing pass is unaffected; this is new-buyer pricing only. Plex has also been rolling remote streaming behind a paid Remote Watch Pass since 2025, expanding device by device across mobile, Roku, smart TVs, and game consoles through this year.
None of that is a scandal — Plex is a company, companies charge money, and remote streaming infrastructure genuinely isn’t free to run. But it’s a very different pitch than “buy once, own it forever,” and it’s exactly the kind of change that makes self-hosting look better by comparison, not because Jellyfin is more polished, but because nobody can do this to you when you own the whole stack.
Jellyfin’s founders just walked away
Almost in parallel, Jellyfin had its own shake-up: founder and project leader Joshua Boniface and core team member Anthony Lavado both stepped down in July, days after co-founder Andrew Rabert announced he was leaving too. The reasons aren’t identical, and they’re worth getting right instead of flattening into one story:
- Boniface cited burnout — in his own words, he could no longer give the role the time or mental effort it demanded.
- Rabert left over friction around AI-assisted development tools; the project’s May “State of the Fin” post had already flagged a surge of AI-generated pull requests adding review burden without adding much value.
- Lavado’s departure came down to shifting personal priorities, and he’s staying on through the transition.
By all accounts this was amicable, not a fork-triggering blowup — day-to-day maintenance was already spread across a wider team. And it didn’t slow releases down: RC4 shipped August 2nd, right on schedule, and Jellyfin picked up official Samsung Tizen and LG webOS apps this year too, closing one of its last real gaps with Plex.
Where that leaves us
Open source projects losing founders to burnout is a real risk, not a footnote — it’s how a lot of good tools quietly stall out. But a leadership change caused by burnout and tooling disagreements is a fundamentally different kind of risk than a company deciding your lifetime purchase is worth three times more than it was six months ago. One is a governance problem a community can route around. The other is just what happens when your media library depends on someone else’s pricing decisions.
We’re not moving off Plex over a pricing change that doesn’t even touch existing pass holders. But it’s a real data point in favor of at least knowing Jellyfin well enough to switch quickly if that ever changes — which is exactly what the rest of this series is for.
Sources: Plex’s own pricing announcement, It’s FOSS on the Jellyfin departures.